Collaborative authoring and review process is often used in the development and review of different types of documents. For example, many documents generated in today's electronic society are created by one or more individuals, and then further subject to review by several others. The documents to be reviewed are created as a form of electronic content that is forwarded to others for review and revision, perhaps via an electronic network.
Electronic documents typically contain digital content such as text, images, slides, and spreadsheets. During the creation of a document, content can be subject to revisions over a period of time, often by multiple people. Some document-editing applications—such as word processors, spreadsheet programs, and presentation applications—can allow users to add comments, suggestions, and/or add and delete content.
Authors and reviewers participating in this shared process typically insert markups, comments, and other annotations directly into the file containing the document. In such cases, the document creator or manager can go through the individual pages or sheets comprising the electronic document in order to review the comments. Furthermore, particularly in the cases of documents that include discrete units of content, the ability to readily ascertain or track the number of comments in a document, or whether any comments for subsequent pages are present, can be challenging and at times unclear. Thus, there remain significant areas for new and improved ideas for the efficient development of documents, as well as the management of comments associated with content in an electronic document.